The Deadline (25 page)

“Where would the original be?”

“The girl’s parents would have been served with it.  It should have been delivered the same day this copy went into the file.”

“By whom?”

“It was a civil paper, like a subpoena.  The sheriff, most likely.”

Morgan looked around the stacks of files, some dating back nearly a hundred years.

“Would there be another file in this case?”

“What kind of file?”

“I don’t know.  A guardian file or something?”

Cassie looked closer at the judge’s order dissolving Aimee’s guardianship.

“Yeah, there’s a separate case number here, but it’s probably sealed, like a juvenile case.”

“Where?”

Cassie waved him off.

“Oh no, Jeff.  It’s bad enough we’re here doing this.  God, it’s bad enough I gave you the database.  But if we break the seal on a closed file ...”

Morgan touched his finger to his lips to quiet Cassie.  He spoke calmly.

“I won’t ask you to break the law, Cassie.  But you should know that file might free an innocent man.”

“You already owe me big time.  No way.”

“Okay,” he said.  “I’m sorry.  We can go now.”

He closed the file on Charlie’s crime and started to walk out of the main vault.

“Wait,” Cassie stopped him.  “Would you do it if you were me?”

“For you personally, probably not.  But would I do it to save a man’s life?” Morgan asked her.  “In a heartbeat.”

She closed her eyes and wrestled with the conflict inside her.  The balky fluorescent tube oscillated audibly over them for a long time before she spoke.

“Give me the number again.”

Morgan recited the number written on the order while Cassie wrote it down on a paper scrap.

“And the name?”

“Aimee Little Spotted Horse.”

“Same year, right?”

“Right.  Forty-seven.”

“Wait here.”

Cassie went to a second, smaller vault.  She rotated its combination lock in a deliberate sequence, heaved open the heavy door and disappeared inside.  Less than a minute later, she emerged, holding a thin yellow envelope in front of her.  It was closed with a wax seal.

Morgan reached for it, but she pulled it away from him.

“You have to swear you won’t tell a soul you saw this,” she said, a frightened look on her face.  “I mean
ever
.”

“Cassie, nobody will ever know.”

A man’s voice from the shadows startled both of them.

“I’ll know.”

Trey Kerrigan leaned against the main vault’s doorway.  In one hand, he held a long, black flashlight.  In the other, his father’s black-handled revolver.

Cassie cursed under her breath and began to hyperventilate.  A cold sweat beaded on the back of Morgan’s neck and his heart pounded like thunder.  He raised his hands in front of his chest, not in surrender, but in submission.

“Trey, hear me out before you get the wrong idea here,” Morgan pleaded.

“This don’t look good, friend,” the sheriff said gravely.

“No, it doesn’t,” Morgan admitted, “but I can explain.”

“You bet your ass you’ll explain.  You might want to start by explaining how breaking and entering is covered by the First Amendment.”

“It’s not that way, Trey.”

“Oh no?  In that case, maybe you’d like to show me the judge’s order that says you can sneak in here after hours and unseal that file, huh?”

Morgan said nothing.  Cassie began to tremble so badly she grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself.

“Goddammit, Jeff.  You come back here from the big city and start stirring up shit,” Kerrigan fumed.  “You had to know you’d get splashed.  You go on a fuckin’ crusade to save some lying convict son-of-a-bitch and sell some newspapers.  Now you’re up to your brassy balls in deep shit.  Why couldn’t you just let sleeping dogs lie?”

The sheriff’s gun was still pointed at Morgan’s gut.

“Neeley Gilmartin didn’t kill that little girl.  I think I can prove it.  That’s why we’re here.  He didn’t do it.”

“So now my daddy’s a Keystone Kop who couldn’t collar a dog?” Kerrigan said angrily.  His face was red.  “Is that what you’re saying, old buddy?”

Morgan shook his head.  His tongue cleaved to the roof of his dry mouth.

“No, Trey.  You’re dad was the best cop I ever knew.  But maybe he got caught up in something that wasn’t right.”

Trey Kerrigan lurched toward them, his eyes infuriated.

“You son of a bitch.”

Cassie whimpered.  Her knees buckled, but she held herself up by leaning against the table.  She was praying silently.  Morgan reached under her arm to hold her up.

“Trey, please,” Morgan begged.  “Put the gun away and let me show you something.  We’re no threat to you.  Please.”

“I’m not interested in more of your bullshit, Jeff,” Trey snarled, angrier than before.  “I want you to lie down on the floor and put your hands on the back of your head.  Move.”

“Trey ...”

“Now!  Get down!”

Morgan sank to his knees, then lay flat on the cold tiles.  He laced his fingers behind his head and watched the sheriff’s shiny brown cowboy boots walk around behind him, out of his field of vision.

“Look at the file, Trey,” he said.  “Just look at the file.”

“Shut up!”  Kerrigan barked at him.  “You have the right to remain silent, you have the right ...”

“The file, goddammit!  Open it!”

He felt the sharp steel of Kerrigan’s gun crash against the back of his head, crushing his knuckles and smashing his face hard against the floor.  A gash in his scalp welled with blood, but his skull would have been split wide open if his hands hadn’t shielded the blow.

Blood trickled between his fingers into his hair.  His nose was broken and his left cheekbone throbbed where it was driven into the tiles.  His left eye quickly began to swell shut and he tasted blood from a deep cut in his mouth.  Cassie was crying now.

“Keep your mouth shut for once and put your right hand behind your back,” Kerrigan threatened, continuing to read Morgan’s rights.  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law ...”

Morgan was dazed.  The metallic rattle of handcuffs seemed to echo from the distance.  Muddled words piled up in his bloody mouth.

“Trey, the file.  Somebody ... somebody was there ... the day she disappeared.  The file.  Not Gilmar ... somebody ... else.”

“Put your right hand behind your back.  Now.”

Morgan’s tongue thickened and his voice trailed off.

“The paper.  There was a paper ... in the file ... not delivered.  Somebody took it.  Didn’t come forward.  Maybe the last one ... to see her alive.”

Except for the buzzing light above them, silence.

Kerrigan’s boots walked away, where he couldn’t see them.  Morgan heard papers shuffling.  Blood was now dribbling across his temple and dripping onto the floor.  The crimson puddle spread, congealing at the edge.  He tried to flex his left hand, still behind his head, but it was numb and three of his fingers were broken.  His hair was sticky.

“Who was it?” Kerrigan asked.

The edges of the room grew gray.  Morgan felt dizzy.  He swallowed the bloody spit in his mouth and closed his eyes.

Faces swirled on the movie screen in his head, faces he’d never seen and faces he’d never forget.  The shadows behind the camera eddied like ghosts in a dark stream.  Faces in all the violent colors of death.  Faces from dusty folders and old newspapers.  Faces from the fire.  All of them, laughing at him.

“Who was it, damn you?” Kerrigan yelled.  He was miles away now, his voice distant and unapproachable.

Morgan whispered a name, so softly no one could hear.  So softly, he wasn’t sure the sound got past his slack lips.

“Deuce,” he murmured.

Then blackness fell over him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

G
ray, painful dawn seeped through a small window high up on the jailhouse wall.  Morgan’s left eye was swollen shut, but the right one allowed in enough of the dim light to ignite an excruciating spasm deep in his brain.

His tongue was parched and shriveled because he couldn’t breathe through his nose.  It stuck to his flypaper lips and the inside of his cheek until it found enough saliva to wet itself.  The old blood in his mouth tasted like brass.

He clamped his good eye shut until the throbbing in his head subsided.  When he opened it again, he saw Trey Kerrigan sitting on the bed across the jail cell, watching him.

“Morning, sunshine,” the sheriff said.  His tie was draped across a chair and his bloodied uniform shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, a tuft of dark hair showing at his neck.  “You alive?”

“What time?” Morgan whispered hoarsely.

“Six.”

Morgan groaned and closed his eyes.  A sparkling filament of light danced behind his eyelids, as if he were watching a bad memory glimmer across an airless synapse.

“I brought you down here and cleaned you up,” Kerrigan said.  “Jail nurse come down and put a couple stitches in the back of your head, no extra charge.”

Morgan covered his face with his arm and said nothing.  A long finger of pain scraped his neck as he tried to turn his head toward the wall.

“You were in and out all night, talkin’ to yourself.  A couple times, I thought you were awake and you’d drift off again.  Nurse says you got a few busted fingers and probably a mild concussion.”

Morgan’s throat was dusty.  His voice sounded like two flat rocks being scraped across each other.

“You stayed?”

“Yeah.  I stayed here with you.”

“Cassie?”

“She went straight home last night.  Don’t worry.  She’s a little shook up but she’ll be okay.”

Somewhere down the corridor, another prisoner grunted, then vomited forcefully.  The sickening sound reverberated in the hot closeness of the basement jail.

“Well, Arly’s up,” Kerrigan said.  “That boozer will be wantin’ breakfast, soon as he finds his teeth in the bottom of the stool.”  

Morgan squinted and looked at the man who’d once been his best friend.  In the past day, he realized just how long ago it had been.

“Why?”

“‘Cause he upchucked ‘em.”

“Why did you hit me?”

Kerrigan paused but made no effort at apology or explanation.

“Can I get you some eggs and bacon?  A roll?  Coffee?  We got a regular all-you-eat buffet, as long as you like eggs and doughnuts.”

“You lost it.”

The sheriff rubbed his tired eyes.  He didn’t look up.  He just spoke toward the floor.

“You remember how when we were kids, we’d ride our bikes out Wilkerson Road in the summer and hunt for dust devils?”

“For Christ’s sake, Trey ...” Morgan mumbled.

“You always told me that if I jumped in the eye of a dust devil, it’d just blow itself out.  Remember that?  Like its life came from the center.  Like any little boy had the power to snuff out a prairie cyclone if he just knew where to stand.  Remember?”

“What’s your point?”

“I always thought I knew where to stand.  I never thought I’d get sucked up in this whirlwind.  It was like things were swirlin’ too fast all around me and I got scared.  The election, you comin’ back to town, this little girl’s murder, and now the bomb.  There I was, right in the eye of it, and the dust devil didn’t blow itself out, goddammit.  It sucked me dry.”

“The election?”

“Yeah, mostly.  This job is the only thing I ever dreamed of.  When you brung up this old case, I got all defensive about my dad.  I felt betrayed by you.  I just sort of dug in my heels until I was in over my head.”

“You sicced Switzer and Tasker on me, didn’t you?”

“I only wanted to put the fear of God in you.  That’s all.  I needed time.  I didn’t want this old murder case fuckin’ everything up.”

“But you should have wanted justice done.  You forget about that?”

Kerrigan couldn’t look up.  “I guess I did.”

“Why?”

“Part of me couldn’t believe my father might have been wrong about this guy.  The other part of me didn’t want anyone else to think it, either.  It got so dark, I lost my way, Jeff.”

Morgan’s old friend had betrayed him.  That hurt worse than any physical wound he’d inflicted.

“The paper.  Was that part of the plan, too?”

“No, that wasn’t me.  Swear to God.  You gotta believe me.  No rough stuff, just mind games.”

“Then what was last night?  A tea party?  You held a gun on me, for Christ’s sake.  You scared the shit out of me.”

“You scared me, too.  I thought maybe I killed you there for a minute.  But I was wrong.  I wasn’t myself.”

“No, you were a total asshole.”

The sheriff chuckled self-consciously.

“You always had a way with words, my friend.  But you’re right.  I was an asshole.”

“A total asshole.”

“Total.  I’m sorry.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking at all, Jeff.  I was just outta my head.  I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t forgive me, but I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart.  I’m ashamed of what I did.  My dad would whup my ass good if he was here.”

There was a long silence between them.  A steel door opened down the corridor and Morgan heard unintelligible voices before it closed again.

“What are the charges?”

“What charges?”

“Against me.”

“You’re not under arrest.”

Morgan was astonished.  His last conscious memory before waking up in jail was being pistol-whipped and  handcuffed in the courthouse vault.

“I can go?  Just walk right out of here?”

“Not yet.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

Kerrigan stood up and tossed a manila folder on Morgan’s belly.

“Read this and clean up a little bit, then I’ll take you home.”

“What is it?”

“The investigative file on Gilmartin.  There’s an autopsy report in there, some interview notes, affidavits, photos, stuff that was never made public.”

“Deuce kept this?”

“You’re probably the only other person who ever saw it, besides me.  The defense never even got this material.”

Morgan rolled onto his side and fumbled with the folder, but his broken fingers were splinted in rigid plastic tubes and wrapped in sterile tape.  He had trouble opening it.

“Like what?”

“Well, the girl had a little locket that was never found.  Could be at the bottom of the Black Thunder River, but in case her killer kept a souvenir, it was kept quiet.”

“Anything else?”

“Her body was in bad shape, but the doc said she was probably raped.  Her vagina was badly ripped, deep inside. Serious injury, but not likely from the river.  If there was semen, it had decomposed.”

The possibility Aimee had been raped had always haunted Morgan.  He was not surprised.  He tried to put her little face out of his mind.

He couldn’t turn the pages in the folder, so he spread them across the blanket.  He caught a glimpse of grisly, black-and-white autopsy photos, now faded brown and crisp to the touch.  But even if they’d been more sharply focused and in color, he couldn’t have recognized the bloated mass of water-logged flesh as Aimee.

“Just give me the quick summary,” he asked.  He was flustered by his painful disability, sickened by the pictures in the file.

Kerrigan walked out the open cell door and stood in the corridor outside, buttoning the collar of his uniform blouse.  The dried blood on it was Morgan’s.

“Bottom line?  Your guy probably didn’t do it.”

Morgan bolted upright on the jail bed.

“What?”

“Almost thirty years ago, my dad sent a letter to the judge, saying he’d uncovered new evidence in the case that, at the very least, should mean a new trial for Gilmartin.”

“What evidence?”

“Those two witnesses who said they heard Gilmartin threaten the girl’s father in a bar fight?  They lied.”

“Why?”

“Gilmartin had been stealing cows for months and selling them at the South Dakota feedlots.  The big ranchers had their suspicions.  Of course, one of them decided he didn’t need the law to punish a cow thief.  These two boys worked for him.  It was all a set-up.”

“Who was it?”

“Jack Madigan.”

Morgan was stunned.

“I’ll be damned.  Jack Madigan?  Are you sure?”

“My dad busted one of those cowboys on a statutory rape charge in the late Sixties.  He cut a deal by spillin’ his guts on the Gilmartin frame-up.  A couple weeks after the girl was killed, he and Madigan come up with this story.  Pretty damn cold-blooded, but there wasn’t gonna be no more rustlin’ on the Sun-Seven.”

Aimee’s photograph flashed through Morgan’s mind.  He saw her in her pretty white Sunday dress, the one she was buried in.  He saw Bobby Madigan, the lonely boy who grew up to be known as Buck.  But the face behind the camera, the face he couldn’t see, was Jack Madigan’s.

“How’d they know Gilmartin wouldn’t have an alibi?”

“Turns out they’d been at the same bar on the day of the murder.  He was drunk on his ass the whole time, passed out in the corner.”

“They could have just beat the shit out of him as a warning.”

“What they did was worse than any beating.  They took away his life without ever layin’ a finger on him.”

The cowboy’s hand-written affidavit, dated 11/4/69, was in the file.  Morgan read it quickly as his grim astonishment transformed to anger.

“Jesus Christ, why didn’t the judge order a new trial?”

“The second worst kind of politics:  Friendship.  Darby Hand served in the state legislature with Adhamh Madigan back in the Thirties, before he was a judge.  They were real close and he wasn’t about to put a Madigan in jail for suborning perjury.  They had nothin’ else.  He tore up my dad’s letter.”

“But Gilmartin’s threat against Charlie was their whole case.  Without it, Gilmartin goes free.”

“You can see how the old man was satisfied a certain twisted justice had been served:  Gilmartin had already confessed his crime, and his accuser, an admitted liar, was going to prison, too.  From where the judge sat, all the bad guys got what was comin’ to them.  But it didn’t make any difference.”

“Why’s that?” Morgan asked.

“Jack Madigan died a month later and his cowboy got shanked his first week in prison.  Seems he wasn’t in a romantic mood.  Dead men make bad witnesses.”

“If Gilmartin didn’t do it, who did?”

“I don’t know.”

Morgan’s suspicion took a sharp new turn.

“Could Madigan have been covering up a murder?”

“We’ll never know.  Maybe.  Then again, maybe he was just an opportunist, looking to plug a varmint predator.  Either way, he was a damn smart fella.”

“How long have you known all this?”

“Since you asked me for the file.  It was in my dad’s private papers, stuck in a box in my cellar.”

“Why the hell didn’t you do something?”

“By the time I knew, Gilmartin was already out of prison.  He wasn’t gonna live long enough for the county attorney to file a motion, much less for another trial.  Wasn’t much more I could have done for the guy.”

“You could have cleared the man’s name in two minutes.  No fucking press releases or legal briefs.  Clean.  Why didn’t you?”

The sheriff pursed his lips and stared at the floor, like a little boy caught in a big lie.

“The worst kind of politics,” he demurred.  “Money.  If it wasn’t for Buck Madigan, my campaign wouldn’t have two nickels to rub together.  Gilmartin was gonna die and the whole goddamned whirlwind was goin’ to disappear if I just stood my ground.  I only needed to stall you until the old man died and the whole thing would go away.”

Morgan’s gut was twisted in a knot.  Gilmartin came to him seeking redemption, but found doubt.  He’d been offered the uncommon chance to change one man’s life — the only thing he’d ever really yearned to do as a newspaperman — and he’d walked away from it.  Now, Gilmartin might die never knowing.  Hell, Morgan wasn’t even sure if the old man had survived the night.  He wanted to vomit.

“So why are you telling me now?”

“Because I got a scoop for you.  I’m finished.  I’m pullin’ out of the sheriff’s race.”

“Oh, shit.”

“When I was a kid, I only wanted to be like my dad.  He happened to be the sheriff, so I wanted to be the sheriff, too.  But last night, while I laid there in that bed and prayed to God I hadn’t killed my best friend, I knew I wasn’t like my dad at all.”

Morgan swung his legs to the side of the bed and looked for his shoes.

“Trey, listen to me.  This thing isn’t over.  I think the killer is still alive.”

“Alive?  Here?  How do you know?”

“There’s no time to explain.  I need your help now, more than ever.”

“Sure.  What do you need?”

“I need you to take me home, then you’ve got to find out who delivered that judge’s order in the file we were looking at last night.  Check the number.  It was issued on the same day Aimee disappeared:  August second, 1948.”

“Who the hell you think I am?  Barney Fife?” the sheriff asked indignantly.  “I already looked.”

“And?”

“Our logs say the paper was delivered by Wes Crockett, a deputy back then.”

“The old guy who used to bust up the beer parties with the dogs?  What do you know about him?”

“Boy Marine, straight arrow.  Enlisted in the Corps when he was fifteen and saw action all over Hell.  Never got a scratch.  By the time my dad hired him as a deputy right after the Second World War, they say he was already an old man, all of twenty-one.”

“Could he be involved?”

“Wes Crockett?  No way.  Real quiet and soft-spoken for a grunt.  Never talked about the war.  He was the one that convinced my dad we needed a canine unit, so they called him Deputy Dawg.  Forty years he worked here, then just decided that was enough.”

“Is he still alive?”

Kerrigan huffed.

“Christ, Jeff.  Give me some credit, will ya?  Yeah, he’s still alive.  Retired back in ‘Eighty-five.  He took his dogs and bought himself a cabin somewhere on the Oregon coast.  No phone.  I got the local county mounties tryin’ to contact him right now.”